Wireless communication systems can be configured to support many different communication types. For example, a wireless communication system can support one-to-many, many-to-one, and one-to-one communications. Additionally, communications may be unidirectional or bidirectional. Thus, a wireless communication system that supports bidirectional communication having one-to-many communications in a first direction can support many-to-one communication in the opposite direction.
In a bi-directional communication system, the communication links can be allocated or can be randomly assigned. In the case of random assignment, a communication system may allocate one or more random access channels for requesting communication links and for reporting overhead information relating to assigned links.
A wireless communication system, such as an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) communication system can allocate channels in both time and frequency. The transmitter in and OFDM system can be restricted to a particular power or power range. Thus, the use of overhead channels in addition to data channels can adversely affect the amount of energy available to support a data channel. However, the use of such overhead channels can be important for the operation of the system. In particular, a mobile device may need to communicate over multiple channels in order to negotiate a handoff between serving stations. It is desirable to minimize the effects of supporting multiple communication links to multiple random access channels.